The Politics and Poetics of Transgression"Applying the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin and recent French critical theorists to the concept of hierarchies in Western society, Stallybrass and White explore the symbolic polarities of the exalted and the base. The authors compare high and low discourse in a variety of domains, and discover that, in every case, the polarities structure and depend upon each other and, in certain instances, interpenetrate to produce political change. In this wide-ranging book, the authors, drawing largely on Bakhtin's notion of the carnival, map out hierarchies in literary and cultural history. Looking closely at a variety of texts from the 17th to the 20th century, they find that high-low oppositions occur in four symbolic domains--psychic forms, the human body, geographic space, and social order--and are fundamental to the mechanisms of ordering in European culture. Transgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of these domains, the authors assert, is likely to have major consequences in the other three. Unconfined by conventional disciplinary boundaries, this investigation of the interplay between limits and transgressions within hierarchies will fascinate students of literary theory and English literature as well as those of intellectual and cultural history, psychology, and anthropology." -- Back cover |
Contents
The Fair the Pig Authorship | 27 |
the Sewer the Gaze and | 125 |
Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque | 171 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
ambivalence animals argued associated attacks attempt audience authorship Bakhtin Bartholomew Fair Ben Jonson Benjamin bourgeois bourgeoisie CALIFORNIA/SANTA CRUZ carnival carnivalesque Chadwick circus civilized classical body coffee-house contamination Court crowd CRUZ The University Cullwick demonization desire dirty disgust displacement domains domains of discourse dream Dryden Dunciad eighteenth century emergent English excrement filth Freud grotesque body Hannah Cullwick Helgerson hierarchy high and low Hugo hybridization hysteria hysterical identity inversion Jonson judgement labour language literary London lumpenproletariat maid marketplace Mayhew mediation Mikhail Bakhtin mother negation nineteenth century Norbert Elias nurse play pleasure political Pope popular culture popular festivity produced prostitute public sphere Rabelais realm relation repertoire repression ritual scene semiotic sewer sexual slum Smithfield social formation street structure suppression symbolic Terry Eagleton theatre topography transcoding transformation transgression University Library UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/SANTA vulgar whilst Wolf Wordsworth writing wrote